Sunday, May 13, 2012

Happy Mother's Day, Mom, and to all the other mothers who read this too! I hope no one minds that I'm always a day behind on my holidays. I guess that's one of the negatives about being in the last time zone

It's been beautiful this week so it finally dried out. The sun was out, it wasn't too hot, and there was hardly any wind. The volunteers have been keeping busy with the albatross chick banding, and Ive been keeping busy on the computer. I found a few minutes to get out and see some things though. I'll explain more in the photo captions.

This is one of our Black-footed albatross plots. The volunteers have banded pretty much all of the black-footed albatross chicks, but have quite a few Laysan chicks to go.

There are a lot of white terns putting eggs everywhere. This one found some old bedframes in the Ski Warehouse to lay it's egg.﻿

This is the white tern chick that I showed you a couple of weeks ago under its parent. It looks like it's still doing ok.﻿

It was too nice of a day to pass up a boat trip today. The water was about as flat as it gets. This is a marker that ships use to align themselves to make it through the channel cut in the coral. The dark spot on the right side of the picture is a spotted eagle ray. We saw a few of them today. We also saw a manta ray, which I got a few underwater pictures of, but they were a little far away.

This is the USS Macaw (ASR-11). Today was the first time I had a chance to swim down and see it. There's a really interesting story to this wreck. It was a submarine rescue ship which tried to rescue the submarine USS Flier (SS-250), which had run aground in bad weather. It ran aground too. The weather was terrible and 5 sailors died during the weeks that it was grounded. They ended up having to use explosives to demolish the ship to clear the channel. This bow section is relatively intact, but the rest of the ship is strewn all over the bottom. Here are some quick links to some photos and accounts. http://www.ussmacaw.org/http://www.papahanaumokuakea.gov/maritime/macaw.html

I checked out a few new spots today. There were a lot of whitebar surgeonfish and convict tangs following me around.

The yellow tangs really brighten things up.

The dolphins came to check out the boat, as usual. I got a couple of pictures by putting my camera over the side.

I was going really slow, so the dolphins were swimming only a foot or two in front of the bow.

About Me

After high school I went into the Navy doing nuclear power stuff on a submarine. After 6 years, I left the Navy then got my biology degree from Montana State Univ. I then worked for the USDA doing human nutrition research for 8 years. I also got my Master's Degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of North Dakota. While doing that I worked for Mr. Ellie Pooh selling elephant dung paper (google it) to help the Sri Lanka elephants. After that, I did the only logical thing with my MS and moved to Cleveland, OH and got a job in security at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It was great, for a while, but I found a 1 year temporary job at Midway Atoll with the US Fish & Wildlife Service. I loved it so much that I moved to an even smaller island with only 4-15 people (Tern Island). After being the Asst Manager, then the Manager, I got the chance to go back to Midway as the Wildlife Biologist for a few more years. Just so you know, I didn't write this as an employee, I just commented about my days here and put up some photos, so these aren't the views of the FWS. I still do ocean work for the FWS, but I do it from the Headquarters office in the Washington D.C. area.